Google Scholar

As you know an MP’s day-to-day working involves a great deal of research to keep up to date with latest policy ideas and Bills running through Parliament.

Now Google have come up with a cracking first-rate search engine http://scholar.google.com/ looking up scholarly literature including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. This should greatly enhance our research capability. Released yesterday for beta testing, it looks promising and you may like to try it out as well.

Well, the more functions Google can offer the better, because Microsoft is planning to leverage it out of the search engine market. For the good of the Net, I certainly hope they don’t succeed. A good laugh at Steve Ballmer’s expense:

Hey Boris, Good to see you blogging about some more general issues. Thanks. Blogs are an opportunity for people to find each other and converse, let’s do that, and let’s LINK, as part of a conversation.

I know you’re still extremely busy Boris, but maybe now you’re not in the shadow cabinet you’ll be able to focus more on e-democracy. Maybe you can build up an admired online presence, and become the new Tory E-Democracy Tsar. Internet use is a brilliant way for the Tory party to move up-to-date and help look electable again.

By the way, “Google doesn’t plan to charge for the service nor use the feature to deliver text-based ads – the primary source of its profits. “Google has benefited a lot from scholarly research, so this is one way we are giving back to the scholarly community,” said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer”. (From http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/TechNews/Internet/2004/11/18/719492-ap.html)

Ed – Buzzmachine is a pretty influential blog. It’s author, Jeff Jarvis, is quoted in the mainstream media, and has recently had a run of interviews on radio and CNN (http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_11_18.html#008502). He seems to think outside the box, and certainly “gets” the power of the internet.

Google Scholar appears to be an extension of their web crawling technology applied to online scholarly literature. But the online publisher may only publish the abstract and limit full access to paying subscribers.

Shouldn’t the full text of taxpayer-funded research be available to taxpayers?

My understanding of The Guardian article (Government ‘obstructs science access’)http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1345865,00.html
(sorry, couldn’t find an online telegraph quote)
suggests the Government is in favour of severely limiting the usefulness of search engines such as Google Scholar.

John: It’s wrong to assume that published academic research is taxpayer funded, because, at least in my field, much of it is funded by industry. Also, the publishing houses are not owned or operated by the government. The system is set up to allow academics to publish without having to worry about the cost. If academics had to pay, the result would be that rich universities would be able to publish more papers than poor ones. Where research funding is hard to come by, publication would be impossible, and where research is funded by government or the EU, the taxpayers would end up paying the publication costs. As it stands, you only pay a small share of the publication costs for the paper that you want to read.